The World's 18 Strangest Gardens

Designing a landscape can be as simple as planting a backyard garden or as complex as shaping tons of earth around a city. As eco-friendly design continues to prosper, landscape architects are devising new ways of gleaning environmental benefits from the natural surroundings while minimizing how buildings disrupt the scenery. Meanwhile, smaller-scale gardens are being designed to explore abstract concepts and catalog fauna from around the globe. From an ancient agricultural site in Sri Lanka to the fledgling crops of the International Space Station, we dug up this collection of the world's most noteworthy gardens and landscapes.

California Academy of Sciences' Living Roof

California Academy of Sciences' Living Roof

Location: San Francisco, Calif.

Background: Roof gardens can pose significant construction and maintenance challenges, and adding hills to the mix doesn't make things easier. The crew behind the California Academy of Sciences' living roof installed a multilayered soil-drainage system and chose to rely mainly on natural irrigation to nourish native plant species and minimize upkeep. In 2008, the building received LEED Platinum certification—the highest rating possible—partly because of the roof's awesome insulation capabilities, which keep the building an average 10 degrees cooler than a typical roof would.

Why It's Unique:

The garden's two larger contours sync up to the planetarium and rainforest exhibitions down below, but the roof is as functional as it is aesthetically pleasing. "The mounds really came from the fact that when you look from afar, the backdrop is San Francisco's hills," says Bill Callaway of SWA Group. This leading landscape architecture and urban design firm helped design the Academy of Sciences' living roof, and has worked on projects ranging from Google's HQ to Burj Khalifa's Tower Park. "So really what the architect was trying to do was echo those hills in the project by putting them on the roof." By adding an open-air observation deck, the designers created an ideal location to watch the birds and the bees buzz around the lush plant life.

Las Pozas

Las Pozas

Location: Xilitla, Mexico

Background: English surrealist and poet Edward James went to the Mexican rainforest to create a spectacle of a garden that blends strange architecture into an already vivacious environment. Walkways stamped with footprints, Orchid-inspired sculptures and fantastical structures looming over the landscape are just some of the features laced throughout the 40 or so acres.

Why It's Unique:

At points, it seems as though the abundance of artwork would detract from the beauty of the natural landscape and diverse fauna. Then again, it's a small plot of land when considering the size of the whole rainforest, and as the years pass, the artwork and gardens meld into the environment more and more. "I suppose it's true of architecture, but certainly landscape design; it doesn't take too many years when left to its own devices to be eaten up by the jungle," Callaway says. "The natural landscape is going to win out." James died in 1984, and nature has been busy consuming the features so rapidly that Las Pozas was recently named an endangered cultural site by the World Monument Foundation.